Bugonia
Drama • 2025 • 2 hours
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
The starting point is simple and hallucinatory: two young people, convinced that a top executive is in fact an alien, kidnap her in order to “save” the planet.
The real conspiracies are practices expressed through law, politics, technology, and finance… these are most often announced in public, and yet they do not compete with digital theories. That is our problem: the real “conspiratorial practices” encounter less resistance.
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden
With Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos continues his laboratory on the factory of alienations and our modern superstitions, but shifts the axis from domestic grotesque to collective obsession. The starting point is simple and hallucinatory: two young people, convinced that a top executive is in fact an alien, kidnap her in order to “save” the planet. That it is an English-language remake of the Korean cult Save the Green Planet! matters only up to a point: Lanthimos bends it to his own lexicon of stifled laughter and moral ferocity, grafting the theme of conspiracy onto a torture chamber that looks very much like our everyday information space.
The title refers to an ancient myth, born in Greece but with even more remote roots in the observations of Egyptians and Chinese: the generation of insects from the carcass of a dead ox. An image of life springing from putrefaction, a suggestion that crossed centuries and cultures until it was told by Virgil in the fourth book of the Georgics, where Aristaeus, after tragedies and losses, manages to bring about the rebirth of bees through a ritual sacrifice. This myth of “bugonia,” questioned only in the seventeenth century with the refutation of the theory of spontaneous generation, becomes here a contemporary allegory. Transposed into the present, it is the perfect metaphor for how conspiracy theories swarm from symbolic carcasses — among out-of-control technology, war, and climate crisis — and how they generate a feverish and self-destructive industriousness. Lanthimos does not merely describe them: he stages them as ritual, as if filming were an imperfect exorcism.
Emma Stone, here a pharmaceutical CEO with a cutting smile and indecipherable impulses, reunites with the director for the fourth time and also serves as producer. The character tailored for her is a gleaming surface, smooth as glass, an elegant garment onto which her captors project beliefs, phantoms, and hunger for meaning. Stone plays by subtraction, turning vulnerability into a threatening zone: a mere inflection is enough to suggest the doubt that the “alien” is not her but the ideology surrounding her. The science fiction echoes work in transparency, more conceptual than decorative; what remains is the unstable oscillation between black farce and ethical experiment.
And it is in this claustrophobic ecosystem that the film builds its strength: the conspirators, the anonymous crowd, the manipulative media, the corroding psychosis, nutrition itself becoming another battlefield, and the lack of reference points that are not delirious. Everyone seeks a foothold, true or false, it does not matter: what counts is anchoring oneself to a conviction, while power continues to weave physical and psychological victims. Here the CEO’s kidnapping takes on added weight: not just a delusion of persecution, but the reflection of a real trauma, a wound that precedes paranoia and justifies it.
Visually, Bugonia once again relies on Robbie Ryan’s eye: milky light, framings that cut faces like tiles, domestic geometries transformed into traps. The editing sharpens the prisoner–jailer dynamic into a score of reversals where certainties crumble under the blows of details (a shave on screen, a whisper, a pause held too long). Jerskin Fendrix’s disturbing score, invasive, slithers like a doubt: it does not explode, it corrodes. Everything contributes to a clinical-experiment mood where laughter, when it breaks out, hurts like a bitter grimace.
The protagonist ends up being our most unpleasant mirror: a beekeeper obsessed, speaking with the urgency of the “awakened,” and yet secretly longing for a narrative that will absolve him. Delbis counters him with an insecurity that constantly slips into complicity: Lanthimos uses their duo to map the emotional contagion of belief, as if the very air were charged with interpretive spores. When violence comes (and it does), it is not a shock: it is the natural sedimentation of a saturated and thoroughly alienated environment.
“Reality” here is not outside the door but the terrain of investigation. At the Venice press conference, the director insisted that the film is not dystopian but adheres to the present: AI, disinformation, collective anesthesia. The kidnapping then becomes a theater of verification: who interrogates whom? on the basis of what evidence? with what purification rituals? Lanthimos’ cinema, from Dogtooth to The Lobster to Kinds of Kindness, delights in embedding arbitrary rules to expose the social monster; Bugonia updates them to the era in which every timeline is an interrogation room.
If the film can be faulted, it is for its occasional indulgence in verbal power games: at times Lanthimos seems to enjoy the mechanism more than its stakes, and in some turns the ambiguity stands out. The extremity of the operation convinces, especially when the staging narrows to the edge of abstraction and Stone, impenetrable, becomes an icon of a gaze that looks at us as we look at it. In that instant, the question of the “true alien” ceases to be narrative and becomes speculative — a reflection that does not console.
Bugonia, more than an apotropaic rite, is a playful mantra of the apocalypse — or end of the world, as one prefers to call it… an oracle of Delphi, a Cassandra syndrome.
For times saturated with explanations: a black comedy that places the body on the operating table and asks what story — and what monster — we are feeding. Imperfect, angular, but necessary like a cut of air in a windowless room.
For times saturated with explanations: a black comedy that places the body on the operating table and asks what story — and what monster — we are feeding. Imperfect, angular, but necessary like a cut of air in a windowless room.
The finale, set to the rhythm of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” written by Pete Seeger (a text to be read and listened to), once sung by Joan Baez and also by Marlene Dietrich, is beyond any expectation: the switch is OFF, the images resemble contemporary paintings of a sublime and cathartic end.
A sure way to make people believe falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
